Comment by bell-cot
3 years ago
Ever-growing armies of ever-better-paid administrators aren't going to magically pay for themselves. And a university won't be atop America's merciless academic pecking order for long if it's burdened with scruples about funding sources.
This comment is vague but it sounds like you're downplaying the seriousness of funding sources.
This isn't a paranoid conspiracy or dramatic judgement. Companies really do pay for particular research results that benefit them. This has been going on at least since gasoline had lead in it.
I think you might be misunderstanding the amount of distrust placed in the root comment. He's claiming the more prestigious a University is, the more likely they are to take unethical funding because increased funding leads to more prestige. It's an attack on the integrity of modern science as practiced by academia, not on a subset of studies.
I kind of think the status of US schools is not very well known, or at least not consistently known:
To summarize the situation. US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc. across the board. If a teacher is hired, it is most likely for part-time, on lower wages, with fewer benefits. If a teacher is guaranteed tenure after x many years, chances are they will be laid off, and their programs cancelled before this happens. At the primary level, schools are being aggressively merged, and sometimes even closed, to save money for the school district.
At the same time administrators in said schools are ballooning, more administrators are being hired, and their pay keeps going up (while other staff pay is stagnant). If there is money being allocated to the schools, it most likely goes into administration, not education. Administration has also become a political gig. Administrators move between school systems, get higher and higher positions, fill out their resumes, and gain prestige (all the while being payed more and more). What they actually do, is anybodies guess, most of the time they are simply in the way of teacher making actual changes which would benefit students. A typical scenario is a new higher administrator comes in, wants to look important and decides to create more administrator position and hire a security contractor to impose a security theater on campus.
I guess this this what your grand-parent was talking about. And how it comes to no-ones surprise when funding for this ballooning administration costs come from the same industry which is killing us all and our climate.
5 replies →
the bigger issue you overlooked is the constant growth of bureaucratic overhead sucking up the watershed of resources and leaving only a trickle for the people actually putting together the curriculum, teaching and researching.
The administrators are useful to a point but they vastly overstate their importance and erode everything they touch overtime like a malignant cancer in a lot of organizations.
"lot of organizations" your being generous.
1 reply →
What's the equivalent of "/s" for bitter cynicism?
You don't have to write anything, you just down a shot of the cheapest whiskey you can find.
I think you misread them
As cynical as we can count on these people to be - they're also smart enough to recognize that continually whoring themselves out to the highest bidder can, apart from undermining Stanford's integrity (which they obviously don't care about), also be detrimental to their bottom line in the longer run.
In fact this seems to be the only way they eventually learn:
In response, more than 800 people affiliated with the university have signed a letter calling for a funding ban, and some alumni say they won’t donate to their alma mater until it happens.
https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/30/from-the-community-we-r...
I find the notion donating to your alma mater kind of odd. You don't donate money to the local McDonald's that made a burger for you do you? I mean, you could but that's not something that's regularly done.
The service was provided and paid for and now there's some expectation to give more money after the fact?
In reality people also build relationships and emotional attachments. It’s also somewhat more mission driven, via research, medical centers, etc.
Those are reasons, whether they're good or not depends on perspective.
I don’t know how representative this is, but when I talked to one of my school’s donation people, it sounded like most people don’t donate to the unrestricted fund, which the school can do whatever with it’s usually earmarked/restricted for a specific use, like a building, a specific department, whatever. The school really really wants unrestricted funds.
Personally, I donate to my old dorm’s social/making stuff fund, the students get way more out of those dollars a lot further than I do, and I always appreciated that we had that budget.
With McDonald's and the Krocs they were the ones making the donations after they had more money than anyone would ever need:
https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2017/1/10/joan-krocs...
The mission of the university, from the university's perspective, is to advance the world's fundamental knowledge first and teach students second. (Some may see this as 1a and 1b, mind you, and smaller liberal arts colleges and colleges that do not award doctoral degrees will reduce the fundamental knowledge mission.)
The students, in large part, pay for the educational piece (alongside funding) but significant funding is needed for advancing the world's knowledge.